abstract = "We report on work done to develop a benchmark problem
for genetic programming, both as a difficult problem to
test GP abilities and as a platform for tuning GP
parameters. This benchmark, the royal tree, is a
function that accounts for tree shape as part of its
evaluation function, thus it controls for a parameter
not often found in the GP literature. It also is a
progressive function, allowing the user to set the
difficulty of the problem attempted. We not only
describe the function, but also report on results of
using island parallelism for solving GP problems. The
results obtained are somewhat surprising, as it appears
that a single large population outperforms a group of
smaller populations under all the conditions tested.",